The American legal system, as well as some other legal systems around the world, relies heavily on written judicial opinions—the written pronouncements of judges—to articulate or interpret the laws governing resolution of disputes. Each judicial opinion is not only important to resolving a particular legal dispute, but also to resolving similar disputes in the future. Because of this, judges and lawyers within our legal system are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes.
To facilitate these searches, companies, such as West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minn. (doing business as West Group), not only collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States, but also summarize and classify the opinions based on the principles or points of law they contain. West Group, for example, creates and classifies headnotes—short summaries of points made in judicial opinions—using its proprietary West Key Number™ System. (West Key Number is a trademark of West Group.)
The West Key Number System is a hierarchical classification of over 20 million headnotes across more than 90,000 distinctive legal categories, or classes. Each class has not only a descriptive name, but also a unique alpha-numeric code, known as its Key Number classification.
In addition to highly-detailed classification systems, such as the West Key Number System, judges and lawyers conduct research using products, such as American Law Reports (ALR), that provide in-depth scholarly analysis of a broad spectrum of legal issues. In fact, the ALR includes about 14,000 distinct articles, known as annotations, each teaching about a separate legal issue, such as double jeopardy and free speech. Each annotations also include citations and/or headnotes identifying relevant judicial opinions to facilitate further legal research.
To ensure their currency as legal-research tools, the ALR annotations are continually updated to cite recent judicial opinions (or cases). However, updating is a costly task given that courts across the country collectively issue hundreds of new opinions every day and that the conventional technique for identifying which of these cases are good candidates for citation is inefficient and inaccurate.
In particular, the conventional technique entails selecting cases that have headnotes in certain classes of the West Key Number System as candidates for citations in corresponding annotations. The candidate cases are then sent to professional editors for manual review and final determination of which should be cited to the corresponding annotations. Unfortunately, this simplistic mapping of classes to annotations not only sends many irrelevant cases to the editors, but also fails to send many that are relevant, both increasing the workload of the editors and limiting accuracy of the updated annotations.
Accordingly, there is a need for tools that facilitate classification or assignment of judicial opinions to ALR annotations and other legal research tools.